


Bed of Roses

by theskywasblue



Category: Saiyuki
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Flowers, Introspection, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-30
Updated: 2011-03-30
Packaged: 2017-10-17 09:42:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/175486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theskywasblue/pseuds/theskywasblue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When he brings her flowers, she cries.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bed of Roses

He has never been one for gestures – for symbolism so pointless and convoluted – but he wants to celebrate their new house, their life together, so he brings her flowers and she cries.

He flounders, panicked; he lives with something of a chronic fear of hurting her, a quiet terror of what he feels is her innate fragility.

“Kanan, what’s wrong? Oh, Kanan, please – please don’t cry.”

“I’m sorry,” she wipes her eyes with one hand, touches his face with the other, the tips of her fingers bumping the wire rims of his glasses. “Gonou, it’s not your fault – I’m sorry – but they’re _dead_.”

He looks at the bouquet in his hand – daisies, baby’s breath and a single white rose – they’re from the flower shop down the road, each one beautifully, perfectly cut, wrapped in coloured paper. He thought they were beautiful, when he passed them in their little display, buzzing with wandering bumblebees; but now he sees them the way she does – the petals are a little bit too loose in places, some of the leaves are drooping; they have been sitting, cut, in water in the sun for hours and there is a very faint odour of decay around them.

He throws them in the trash.

Later, after they have made love and are lying together in their bed – a thing of creaking springs, the mattress thin, the frame rickety and just enough to hold them both – he tells her, “I’ll plant you some flowers, Kanan. Living ones. I’ll build a box for the window and I’ll plant whatever flowers you want to grow.”

She smiles; he can feel it against the top of his head when she kisses his hair. “You’re so very sweet Gonou.”

No one has ever called him sweet. No one has ever seen him the way that she does, this beautiful girl, his sister, his lover, who cries over cut flowers.

He trails his fingers over her stomach – his touch feather-light so that she squirms. She has complained, in the last few weeks, about putting on weight, but he loves the way it softens everything about her. “I would do anything for you, Kanan, anything at all.”

He builds the window box, plants wildflowers. Kanan tends them with a careful hand from the very moment the first shoots rise up through the soil.

The buds are just beginning to open when the youkai come for her.

***

“Woah dude – shit! Are you okay?”

Gojyo’s hand on his arm steadies him, and he ducks his head, embarrassed by the sudden, near-loss of his footing on the relatively smooth road. A few people part cautiously around them, shooting them worried glances but saying nothing.

“If you’re getting tired we can go back,” Gojyo touches another hand to the small of his back; not steering him, exactly, but fully prepared to. He can be unfairly gentle at times, unfairly kind.

He waits until the spinning sensation in his head recedes before he looks over at Gojyo – hair backlit by the low sun, violently red - and he has to tramp down the rise of something unspeakable and dangerous in the back of his mind. “I’m fine Gojyo-san, really. I was just dizzy for a moment – but I think the fresh air is doing me a lot of good.”

Gojyo’s brow is a topographical map of worry; he watches him chew in the inside of his lip for a moment – he probably thinks he is being surreptitious about it.

“Truly, I am fine. I would like to go a little further.”

“Okay,” Gojyo offers, reluctant, “we’ll go up to the park and then take a break before we head back.”

“That sounds like a very good plan.”

Gojyo releases his arm, waits for him to take the first step; alert, crimson eyes watching his movements for signs of weakness. He pulls himself tall against the ache along the healing line of his wound, and forces himself to show nothing.

He takes shallow breaths – the absolute minimum – as he moves past the flower stand. All around, the air smells like death.

-End-


End file.
